Wish I'd read this before I started at Google.
Readit Newslukasb commented on Lessons from 14 years at Google addyosmani.com/blog/21-le... · Posted by u/cdrnsf
lukasb commented on MIRA – An open-source persistent AI entity with memory github.com/taylorsatula/m... · Posted by u/taylorsatula
I'm playing around with it, and it's very cool! One issue is that fingerprint expansion doesn't always work, e.g. I have a memory "Going to Albania in January for a month-long stay in Tirana" and asking "Do I need a visa for my trip?" didn't turn up anything, using expansion "visa requirements trip destination travel documents..."
What would you think about adding another column that is used for matching that is a superset of the actual memory, basically reusing the fingerprint expansion prompt?
As usual with Oxide's RFDs, I found myself vigorously head-nodding while reading. Somewhat rarely, I found a part that I found myself disagreeing with:
> Unlike prose, however (which really should be handed in a polished form to an LLM to maximize the LLM’s efficacy), LLMs can be quite effective writing code de novo.
Don't the same arguments against using LLMs to write one's prose also apply to code? Was this structure of the code and ideas within the engineers'? Or was it from the LLM? And so on.
Before I'm misunderstood as a LLM minimalist, I want to say that I think they're incredibly good at solving for the blank page syndrome -- just getting a starting point on the page is useful. But I think that the code you actually want to ship is so far from what LLMs write, that I think of it more as a crutch for blank page syndrome than "they're good at writing code de novo".
I'm open to being wrong and want to hear any discussion on the matter. My worry is that this is another one of the "illusion of progress" traps, similar to the one that currently fools people with the prose side of things.
One difference is that clichéd prose is bad and clichéd code is generally good.
lukasb commented on Touching the Elephant – TPUs considerthebulldog.com/tt... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
I'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
The TPUv4 and TPUv6 docs were stolen by a Chinese national in 2022/2023: https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-the-goo... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-charge...
And that's just 1 guy that got caught. Who knows how many other cases were there.
A Chinese startup is already making clusters of TPUs and has revenue https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3334244/ai-start-...
Yeah I'm terrified that TPUs will get cheaper, that would be awful.
lukasb commented on Launch HN: Phind 3 (YC S22) – Every answer is a mini-app · Posted by u/rushingcreek
I asked about the Peninsula campaign during the Civil War and it gave me an overview, a map, profiles (with photos) of the main military commanders, a relevant Youtube video ... rough edges but overall love the format.
Rough edges: - aspect ratios on photos (maybe because I was on mobile, cropping was weird) - map was very hard to read (again, mobile) - some formatting problems with tables - it tried to show an embedded Gmap for one location but must have gotten the location wrong, was just ocean
lukasb commented on Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science cell.com/trends/cognitive... · Posted by u/DrierCycle
"Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more."
Can they really distinguish between the impact of language on these domains rather than culture? It could be the language you speak, or it could be that you're surrounded exclusively by other people that operate this way.
Recently I've found myself getting the evaluation simultaneously from to OpenAI gpt-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Qwen3 VL to give it a kind of "voting system". Purely anecdotal but I do find that Gemini is the most consistent of the three.
Interesting, I'll give voting a shot, thanks.
From the paper
> The pipeline (bottom) shows how diverse OpenImages inputs are edited using Nano-Banana and quality-filtered by Gemini-2.5-Pro, with failed attempts automatically retried.
Pretty interesting. I run a fairly comprehensive image-comparison site for SOTA generative AI in text-to-image and editing. Managing it manually got pretty tiring, so a while back I put together a small program that takes a given starting prompt, a list of GenAI models, and a max number of retries which does something similar.
It generates and evaluates images using a separate multimodal AI, and then rewrites failed prompts automatically repeating up to a set limit.
It's not perfect (nine pointed star example in particular) - but often times the "recognition aspect of a multimodal model" is superior to its generative capabilities so you can run it in a sort of REPL until you get the desired outcome.
What do you use for evaluation? gemini-2.5-pro is at the top of MMLU and has been best for me but always looking for better.
lukasb commented on Auth.js is now part of Better Auth better-auth.com/blog/auth... · Posted by u/ShaggyHotDog
This is funny to me because when someone asked re: Better Auth "better than what?" my off-the-cuff response was "better than Auth.js" and here we are.
lukasb commented on A postmortem of three recent issues anthropic.com/engineering... · Posted by u/moatmoat
That is a very good start in sharing some level of information with their users, and kudos to the Anthropic team for doing that. However, I don't see any mention of the longstanding issue in CC of API timeout errors. And, at least for me, it's the most frustrating one.
I almost never see these. Maybe issue is your network?